monitoring of public institutions and sharper legal deWnition of rights. In North
America the term has been less prominent in the pronouncements of politicians,
but among academics and intellectuals it has been embraced by Kantian liberals,
communitarian conservatives, and former Marxists (the latter now reinterpreting
civil society as a prerequisite of, rather than a barrier to, goals of distributive justice
and structural change) (Walzer 1995 ; Etzioni 1995 ; Cohen and Arato 1992 ). More-
over, these trends have by no means been conWned to the developed world. In many
Third World contexts ‘‘civil society’’ has been identiWed with the work of numerous
‘‘non-governmental organizations,’’ often partly manned by American and
European expatriates, who aim to create new structures and services that supple-
ment or bypass the activities of corrupt or under-resourced national governments.
And the work of ‘‘NGOs’’ in turn has given rise to many new non-European
formulations of ‘‘civil society,’’ advanced by African, Asian, and Latin American
thinkers, who have identiWed many of its principles and traditions (such as
altruism, mediation, civility, and respect for law) as part of their own indigenous
moral and historic structures (Kaviraj and Khilnani 2001 ; Rowse 2003 , 303 – 10 ).
Most ambitious of all have been the aspirations of the movement for ‘‘Global Civil
Society,’’ which since the late 1990 s has campaigned on many fronts—through
university research groups, activist pressure groups, NGOs, and international
institutions—for the development of a common agenda for ‘‘civil society’’ in all
conceivable cross-national settings, including conXict resolution and avoidance of
wars. This agenda envisages a future when organizations speaking on behalf
of voluntary, non-proWt-making, and participatory movements will constitute a
powerful ‘‘third sector,’’ on a par with state governments and the international
economy, in every part of the world (Barber 2001 – 2 a,b; Keane 2003 ; Kaldor in
Kaldor, Anheier and Glasius 2003 ).
That ‘‘civil society’’ has radically shifted its meaning many times over the course
of 2 , 000 years in diVerent cultures and contexts is perhaps unsurprising. What is
more surprising is that this idea, dreamt up by a small handful of lawyers and
intellectuals in the dying days of republican Rome, still burns and crackles with a
very long fuse in the early twenty-Wrst century. Nevertheless, the massive resur-
gence of ‘‘civil society’’ in recent years makes it a matter of some importance to
clarify what those who constantly invoke it understand by the term, both as a
reformist strategy and as a model of future civilization. When diVerent versions of
civil society clash, or hurtle past each other like ships in a fog, how is the active
citizen or detached political observer to know what is really on oVer?
The answer to this question is no simple matter. Since the 1980 s the outline of
civil society envisaged by its protagonists has taken many forms, ranging over all
four major models suggested above, as well as numerous lesser ones. Thus, in some
quarters civil society has been seen as requiringmuch more extensivestate legisla-
tion, agencies of law enforcement, and monitoring of public services to ensure
greater equality, ‘‘social inclusion,’’ and mediation of conXict. But in other quarters
development of civil society 139